a day of spaghetti…
today was the day of PD spaghetti. Continued from yesterday, I messed around with PD patch to get the sensor data mapped to Organelle control values. I finally found the object to reverse the order of the list: zl rev! yes. now the values are going in with the right order:)
Today, we work with the DJ patch record patch on Organelle. This patch let you sample or use the sample sound files to play back with 2 play heads and one can control the speed of these 2 play heads in both forward and backward direction. The patch sounds simple, in terms of control (I am sure it is not simple to build this patch though!) but we soon noticed it is not so easy to control it in meaningful way.
We set up 4 sensors on Mag: left and right wrists and under arms. At first I set up 1 neural network and trained it with one position for play head 1 with speed 200%/ play head 2 with -200%, another position with play head 1 with -200%/ play head 2 with 200%, then the third position with both the play head with 0% speed. The idea is that then you can control both the play head speed combinations… but the play head 2 moves relative to play head 1 and with this combination, it always sound similar. we tried few other combination of the play head speed and more training positrons… but the result seemed random or too sensitive that it did not feel that Mag had control of the instrument.
After a while, we changed the strategy. These two knobs that controls each play head speed has to be controlled separately. So I set up second neural network and second sensor mapping list. This is making a lot of spaghetti on my PD patch. Fixing something quick is always a bad idea!
After many try outs and bug fixing (it was a simple copy+paste mistake at the end!) we got 2 ml.ann object going. Now left wrist is controlling the play head 1 0-100% while the right wrist+elbow+arm controls the play head 2 -150% to 180%. This seems to work well.
I note that we need to add 2 buttons for the costume: one for disabling the sensor input so Mag can move and adjust other settings or play other instruments without changing the parameters, and one button to fade-out/mute the volume in case things go crazy, or end the show.
Everyday we have to tape up Mag. She seems to be having fun, although it is a bit painful to take the tape out at the end of the day… We plan to try out different placement of the sensors tomorrow, for example on the face to capture mouth moves!
